Trailer Park

Best Trailers of the Week: ‘The Heat’, ‘Upside Down’ and More

Zac Efron’s rebellious phase, Sandra Bullock’s Spanx, Kirsten Dunst upside down, and more of the best movie trailers from this week.

Melissa McCarthy undresses Sandra Bullock, Carey Mulligan’s sexual probes, and Nicole Kidman’s creepy houseguest are all reasons we chose these trailers as our favorites from the week’s selection. Watch spots for The Heat, the Coen brother’s Inside Llewyn Davis, At Any Price, and more.

The Heat (June 28)

Continuing Bridesmaids director Paul Feig’s campaign to prove women are indeed funny, Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock star as tough love cops in his latest crude comedy, The Heat. Slapstick capers and vulgar comebacks ensue when a tight-laced FBI special agent (Bullock) is paired with a fiery Boston copper (McCarthy) to take down a ruthless drug lord. While we appreciate the female-driven cast, we can’t help but notice the trailers biggest laughs come from McCarthy’s recycled probes at gender roles (“Has anyone seen the captain’s balls? They are like really, really tiny little girl balls”). Regardless, we’re looking forward to seeing McCarthy rip off Bullock’s clothes, only to reveal Spanx, on the big screen.

Inside Llewyn Davis (TBD)

The Coen brothers are back, trading the grit and ten-gallon-hats of their last flick for the street graffiti and subways of 1960’s New York. Inside Llewyn Davis follows a singer-songwriter (Oscar Isaac) as he navigates the folk music scene of the era. Based on the trailer, he also appears to have an on-again off-again relationship with a brunette Carey Mulligan and adopts a stray cat. With a recognizable Coen flavor, the trailer entices with laugh-out-loud one-liners, like Mulligan’s character urging Davis to never have sex again, but if he must, to “wear condom on condom, wrapped in electrical tape.” A two-second shot of Garrett Hedlund tells us nothing, other than the fact that he came directly from the On The Road set without a wardrobe change. But the film may have left their most valuable assets out of the spot. Although not featured in the trailer, IMDB credits Justin Timberlake as one of the film’s stars, along with breakout Girls actor Adam Driver.

At Any Price (April 26)

The last time we saw Zac Efron, he was wearing little more than a pair of tighty-whities and falling head-over-school-boy-heels for a woman twice his age. Although The Paperboy didn’t do much to escalate his typecasting as a pretty boy, At Any Price delivers a character who may actually have some substance. The flick revolves around a seasoned farmer (Dennis Quaid) who wants his son (Efron) to take up the family business, but the son has aspirations of racing cars instead of pulling plows. Yet the trailer hints at bigger problems than father-son dynamics—like Heather Graham’s cameo as Efron’s Southern temptation, and a family secret exposed to unkind community politics. Written and directed by Ramin Bahrani, the film will hit theatres April 26.

Stoker Trailer #2 (March 1)

The second international trailer for Stoker hit the interwebs this week, making us more confused than ever. Here’s what we know: Nicole Kidman plays a widow who invites her husband’s brother to live with her and her daughter India (played by Lawless’s Mia Wasikowska). Then things get weird. A montage of clips (a spider crawling up a shoe, a shower sequence) appear more suitable for a Lana Del Rey music video than a film with a beginning, middle and end. But we’re already hooked. A catchy beat escalates an array of precarious, sexual, and nonsensical images that make us impatient to find out what the hell is going on. First reviews of the flick (which premiered at Sundance last week) haven’t been kind to the Chan-Wook Park-directed film, but we think it will be a fun experiment in visual storytelling nonetheless.

Upside Down US Trailer (March 15)

Kirsten Dunst and Jim Sturgess (Cloud Atlas) star in Upside Down, a classic tale of a man and woman who are separated by different worlds of rich and poor. But these worlds are quite literally separate, divided by a sliver of universe and gravity that keeps the two planets from colliding. By wearing a set of magnets that keeps him grounded on her planet, Sturgess’s character can court the well-heeled beauty played by Dunst. We know exactly how this story will unfold, because we’ve seen it a thousand times before. Yet this film, although flooded with all too literal metaphors and CGI effects, looks kind of fun, especially with the talents of seasoned Dunst and Sturgess.

Mood Indigo (TBD)

Wrap your head around this: A young couple is blissfully in love, but their marriage is complicated by the wife’s illness: she has a water lily growing in her lung, and the only cure is to surround her constantly by fresh flowers. Needless to say, Michel Gondry’s latest offering will harken back to the quirkiness of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, allowing viewers to exist in the “real world,” but just barely. I should also mention the trailer is entirely in French, with zero subtitles. But fret not, the cheerful vibes of The Lumineers’s “Hey Ho” track and (500) Days of Summer-esque choreography doesn’t need subtitles to be discernable.

Worst of the Week: Olympus Has Fallen (March 22)

In an attempt to bring back the patriotic plots, foreign bad guys, and dime store CGI effects of action fare of the 1990s, Antoine Fuqua (not a pseudonym for Michael Bay, but instead the director of Training Day) brings us Olympus Has Fallen, starring Gerard Butler, Aaron Eckhart, and Morgan Freeman as the good guys. And if you’ve seen the trailer or even the movie’s poster, the biggest spoiler has already been revealed, and even that is recycled: The White House blows up.